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Left’s Big Donors Gather to Plot Strategy

By Michael Luo November 15, 2010 7:00 amNovember 15, 2010 7:00 am

Starting with a reception and dinner on Monday evening and running through lunch on Wednesday, more than 100 of the left’s biggest donors will huddle at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington to hash over, among other issues, what happened in the 2010 midterm elections and how to respond.

The meeting is a conference for “partners,” or donors, to Democracy Alliance, an organization that was set up in 2005 to help build an infrastructure of liberal-leaning organizations that would serve as a counterweight to similar groups on the conservative side. Well-known Democracy Alliance donors include the likes of George Soros and Peter B. Lewis, billionaires who have given millions to liberal causes.

Sure to be a topic of conversation, if not necessarily during specific sessions but certainly during side conversations among major donors, are plans by David Brock, who runs the non-profit group Media Matters, to start an independent effort aimed at the 2012 elections to counter outside groups on the right that played such a large role in this year’s midterms.

Word about Mr. Brock’s plans began to leak out with a report last week by Greg Sargent, a blogger for the Washington Post. On Friday, Mr. Brock confirmed in an interview with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that he was in the early stages of setting up such a group, which would be focused on House and Senate races, as well as the presidential election.

“One of the lessons we learned this year is we have to start now,” Mr. Brock said.

The group will be a so-called super-PAC, a new kind of independent group that emerged this year after some recent legal changes made them possible. They are able to take in contributions of unlimited size from individuals and corporations and explicitly call for the election or defeat of candidates but must regularly report their donors to the election commission.

In this way, it will be distinguished from many of this year’s biggest-spending Republican-leaning groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS, one of a pair of groups linked to Karl Rove, which are set up as non-profits under Section 501(c) of the tax code. Being organized this way allows them to preserve the anonymity of their donors. The major purpose of those groups, however, is not supposed to be political.

An important outstanding question is whether choosing the route of full disclosure will impede Democratic efforts to raise money to match the right’s activities, as most political operatives agree that many donors prefer anonymity.

Indeed, Democratic operatives set up two super-PACs similar to the one now being planned by Mr. Brock for the 2010 midterms. One group, Commonsense Ten, was focused on Senate races; the other, America’s Families First Action Fund, was focused on House races. But their fundraising came nowhere near that of the biggest Republican-leaning groups.

In another cautionary note for Democrats, Mr. Brock led a much-heralded independent media effort in the 2008 presidential election that failed to gain much traction after the Obama campaign indicated it preferred that donors did not give to such groups.

Recently, however, the Obama White House has signaled it would open to such independent efforts in 2012 but preferred that donors be disclosed.

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